Education scholars’ evolving uses of Twitter as a conference backchannel and social commentary platform
Subject
Social media; Communication in learning and scholarship; Congresses and conventions; ParticipationAbstract
The scholarly community faces a lack of large-scale research examining how students and
professors use social media in authentic contexts and how such use changes over time. This
study uses data mining methods to better understand academic Twitter use during, around, and
between the 2014 and 2015 American Educational Research Association annual conferences
both as a conference backchannel and as a general means of participating online. Descriptive and
inferential analysis is used to explore Twitter use for 1421 academics and the more than 360 000
tweets they posted. Results demonstrate the complicated participation patterns of how Twitter is
used “on the ground.” In particular, we show that tweets during conferences differed
significantly from tweets outside conferences. Further, students and professors used the
conference backchannel somewhat equally, but students used some hashtags more frequently,
while professors used other hashtags more frequently. Academics comprised the minority of
participants in these backchannels, but participated at a much higher rate than their non-academic
counterparts. While the number of participants in the backchannel increased between 2014 and
2015, only a small number of authors were present during both years, and the number of tweets
declined from year to year. Various hashtags were used throughout the time period during which
this study occurred, and some were ongoing (ie, those which tended to be stable across weeks)
while others were event-based (ie, those which spiked in a particular week). Professors used
event-based hashtags more often than students and students used ongoing hashtags more often
than professors. Ongoing hashtags tended to exhibit positive sentiment, while event-based
hashtags tended to exhibit more ambiguous or conflicting sentiments. These findings suggest that
professors and students exhibit similarities and differences in how they use Twitter and
backchannels and indicate the need for further research to better understand the ways that social
technologies and online networks are integrated in scholars’ lives
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